Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund - On the Road Directed by Walter Salles From movieplayer.it

Sam Riley and Tom Sturridge - On the Road Directed by Walter Salles From movieplayer.it

Sam Riley - On the Road Directed by Walter Salles From movieplayer.it

A missed opportunity. It’s a shame because a film based on Jack Kerouac’s famous novel, directed by the Brazilian Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries) and with a cast of major actors (Kirsten Dunst, Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen and Steve Buscemi) could have given us an up-to-date interpretation of the legendary Beat Generation.

Instead,On the Road – competing today at the Cannes Film Festival – completely fails during its two hours plus in going beyond beautiful, glossy images of the actors and the unbounded panoramas of provincial America.

Sal Paradise – the main character in Kerouac’s autobiographical book, played here by Sam Riley – and his beloved friend Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund, who has the statuesque beauty of a young Brad Pitt) travel endlessly, having a thousand adventures, abusing alcohol and drugs, opening themselves to a whole range of different experiences, including sexual ones, to suck out the essence of life.

But what’s missing in this film is their deeper motivation for all this – the revolutionary drive of this movement in the 40s that set itself against the features of bourgeois life: house, work, family and a “secure” future from birth. A film that should shock (the times have changed, but the underlying moral less so) ends up boring the viewer.